to deal with adult-intent traffic for SEOs //

The SEO space for adult sites can be fiercely competitive, but the pervasive adult-intent traffic that is often unwanted remains a challenge for businesses, ecommerce websites and marketplaces.

What is the problem? And what can you do about it?

Non-adult websites can rank well for adult searches

The two terms “adult content” and “adult-intent” are different.

Google can label any website with mature content as “adult”, and restrict its visibility for many queries.

Labeling adult content with a tag will alert Google to the fact that it should be excluded from SafeSearch.

When possible, mature content on the main website should be moved to a separate subdomain.

Adult-intent traffic describes the intention behind the search query regardless of the landing page.

SafeSearch affects Google’s search results

SafeSearch will filter out most adult and explicit content, effectively preventing nudity and sexually suggestive or exploitative content.

Google only displays pornographic websites for specific queries. Google blocks adult-themed websites from appearing in rich snippets and Discover.

SafeSearch makes it more likely that adult-oriented searches in Google will be matched with safe sites and platforms (such as mainstream news websites or educational platforms), which monitor and remove explicit material.

Information about the general public

Google may return non-explicit or general results for many adult queries.

If you search for an adult movie star, the results may be a Wikipedia article or a recent news story about them instead of their explicit content.

Vague queries

Search queries can be interpreted both innocently and in an adult manner. Google will likely favor a non explicit interpretation when SafeSearch is enabled.

If you search for “breast”, the results may include breast cancer, recipes with chicken breast, or anatomical information.

We don’t have a precise estimate of the percentage of Google searches that are adult-oriented, but we do know that many established, authoritative sites and global markets capture a large portion of this traffic even if there is no adult content on these sites.

Adult-intent search can account for 20-40% or more of all SEO visits. This number may be higher in some geos.

All traffic is good traffic, right? What is the problem with adult-intent?

A click can be a click for publisher sites who are able to monetize pageviews via programmatic advertising. The intent of traffic may not be a major factor in determining CPM.

Even capturing adult-intent visits on ad arbitrage websites may be desirable.

This can pose a problem for businesses, platforms or marketplaces who are conversion-oriented but do not cater to adults.

Analytical noise

It’s easy to consider SEO a success when organic search visits increase. What if the majority of these clicks are adult non-converters?

A spike in visits may be due to a competitor or other large websites stepping up their efforts to block adult traffic.

If you don’t have the ability to separate valuable segments of visitors from noise or lack insight, this can lead to:

• Analytical errors
• Time and resources wasted.
• SEO performance is not tied to business results.

It’s costly

What is the return on investment of adult-intent site traffic?

It may be time for you to start reducing the cost of serving adult traffic.

Quantifying adult-intent questions: Navigating traffic data

It is easy to identify but hard to quantify adult-intent traffic.

Unfortunately, there is no tool that will give you all of the keyword data for SEO and tell you what percentage has an adult intent.

The larger the site, higher the risk.

Sites with a long history that don’t restrict the indexing of the search results pages, or marketplaces that rely on user-generated content can amass colossal amounts of traffic by ranking for obscure adult terms using low-quality URLs.

Google Search Console

GSC is an excellent place to begin your search. It does not offer complete keyword data but it provides enough insight to gauge the size of the problem based on a small sample of top-ranking keywords.

Google Analytics

GA (and other web analytics tools), can help you get more specific by analyzing the URLs of top-ranking organic landing pages to look for adult terms and phrases that may be interpreted in a sexually explicit way.

This is particularly relevant for sites that index search results or use UGC to improve SEO.

By comparing adult traffic with engagement and conversion statistics, GA helps you understand the impact on your business.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs can be a great tool for analyzing large lists of keywords.

It’s possible, with a little regex magic and AI assistance, to identify which keywords are adult-oriented and estimate their overall share of traffic.

What is the best part? Competitive intelligence.

Ahrefs allows you to easily analyze your competitors’ standing in relation to adult traffic, and to gain additional insights into their SEO performance.

Segmenting traffic data can provide more detail. Are there any geographies or times of the day, weeks, days, or types of devices that stand out?

Understanding usage and behavioral patterns will make it easier to isolate and eliminate unwanted traffic.

How to reduce and manage unwanted adult-intent web traffic

Here are some ways to reduce traffic with adult intent.

Look at URL slugs as well as on-page keywords

A partial match of keywords or phrases in URLs and on-page keywords can be sufficient to rank an innocent page for one or more adult related queries.

Updates to URLs and elements on the page can be enough to cause unwanted rankings.

It is important to remember that changing the URL of a page will affect its overall ranking and authority.

Use blacklists

Blacklists are often used by paid search teams to block keywords that contain adult, hateful, or harmful content. These lists are also useful for SEO.

Use them to limit the crawling and indexing of URLs by related keywords.

Robots.txt is one of the most common methods to achieve this. This is a quick and easy way to block problematic URLs using regex rules.

This approach has a few downsides. One is that it’s public. It is literally visible to the whole world. Robots.txt is also a downside because it does not allow nuance.

Not all searches with adult intent are equally problematic. It may be sufficient to noindex the page in many cases to allow crawling and discovery of linked content.

On the other side, it may be desirable to use 404 or 410 response codes for URLs that are consistently ranked high in searches for extremely extreme or illicit phrases. This is especially true for websites that generate URLs dynamically.

Noindexing or redirecting to 404 are viable options for URLs that generate adult-intent traffic.

In some cases, blanket rules are not the best option. Consider experimenting with conditional rules.

• Instead of bots, target users.
• Restrict access to only certain users, devices, or geographies that generate unwanted traffic.

Consider engagement-based indexing

A user with adult intent is unlikely to convert at a site that does not cater for adults.

This low-quality visit will have a high bounce rate, low pageviews and no conversions.

Custom indexing logic that generates noindex directives on the basis of user engagement and conversion signals could be a scalable solution for an enterprise website.

Protect your SEO efforts by managing adult-intent traffic

Although adult-intent traffic may increase the number of visitors to non-adult websites, there are questions about the quality and relevance.

Businesses need to understand the difference between traffic and engagement.

Businesses can improve their SEO strategies by identifying, segmenting and preventing unwanted adult-intent web traffic. This will ensure that their content is reaching the right audience.

In the age of data driven decision making, it is not only about attracting eyeballs – but attracting the correct ones.

The first time Search Engine Land published the article How to deal with adult-intent traffic.